Speaking of the country of negligence, Australia is more obscene than Vietnam.
Although Vietnam has countered aid, it still has the restraint of interest balancing, while Australia’s backbone is carried with naked speculation and malicious intentions.
China has opened Beidou core services to Australia for free, and even used satellite data to save lives during mountain fire rescue.
However, this goodwill resulted in a blatant rebellion and turned to join the anti-China alliance.
Australian Beidou cooperation
In 2011, Australia initially sought cooperation, when its agriculture and mining depended entirely on U.S. GPS, but the U.S. said the signal was interrupted, sometimes because of military exercises, sometimes without giving any reason.
Because of these troubles, Australia found China to talk about Beidou cooperation through the Swedish Space Company.
At the time, China had just completed its coverage of the Beidou system in the Asia-Pacific region, and was considering sharing the technology with more countries.
The two sides hit it off. China not only opened up core positioning services, but also sent a team to Australia to install equipment at the Donggara Space Tracking Station in Western Australia and share satellite orbit data.
This tracking station was built during the Cold War and was originally used to monitor satellites, and after the transformation, it became an important hub for Australian access to the Beidou system.
In 2019, a major mountain fire broke out in New South Wales. The fire spread rapidly through strong winds. At that time, the Australia Department of Emergency Management was in a hurry because the GPS image resolution was not enough to find a key breakthrough in the fire.
After the Beidou team of China learned of this, it urgently dispatched satellites to push 17 high-resolution images within 48 hours to accurately mark the trajectory of the fire and the locations of trapped people.
On the basis of these data, rescuers have planned 12 safe routes to successfully rescue 37 people trapped.
After the incident, expert Smith of the Australian Emergency Management Department said in a press conference, "these data saved a lot of lives", but in the official disaster relief notice, only mentioned "international partner support", not even the name of Beidou.
Just when everyone thought that the cooperation would continue, the clouds of 2020 mutated.
The “two-way” agreement was broken.
In September of that year, the Swedish company that managed the Galla tracking station suddenly said it did not renew its contract on the grounds of “receiving notification from the Australian government.”
The Chinese team wanted to go in and dismantle the equipment, but was banned from entering the country. In the end, they could only watch the Beidou equipment in the station be dismantled.
Immediately afterwards, Australia announced the termination of cooperation with three other ground observation stations and destroyed the core equipment of two of them.
The reason for terminating the cooperation was a “national security threat”, but there are complex political factors behind this behavior.
Australia had already begun to take the "anti-China" route in 2018. In August of that year, they became the first country in the world to legislate prohibiting Huawei from participating in 5G construction.
At the time, Huawei had been in Australia for 15 years, investing $230 million to build a 5G trial network, and signed contracts with local telecommunications companies to build 1,200 base stations.
When the ban landed, all the work at the base station were stopped, the optical cables and equipment already laid were sealed, and Huawei Australian branches cut 40%, and many local employees suddenly lost their jobs.
Even more incomprehensible is the fact that Australia clearly defines its boundaries with China in terms of technology, while also relies on China in terms of economy.
In 2022-2023, China's trade reached $317 billion, China bought 26% of Australia's export goods, especially iron ore and coal, without the Chinese market, Australia's economy would have been in trouble.
But even then, Australia continues to be challenging militarily.
In May 2022, an Australian P-8A anti-submarine aircraft approached Chinese warships in the South China Sea, recently only 1.2 km away, and the Chinese aircraft could only be displaced in an emergency.
Australia, in turn, protested, saying China’s behavior was unsafe.
In May 2024, their destroyer, the Hobbit, flew to the Yellow Sea again, sending helicopters to interfere with Chinese naval training, and the Chinese Ministry of Defense later released video evidence clearly showing that Australia was the first to provoke.
After terminating Beidou cooperation, Australia's troubles really began.
The tragic end of the murderer.
Without Beidou's real-time positioning, the route optimization function is useless, and the idle driving rate has risen from 13% to 35%. In 2021, the Pilbara mining area will spend an additional A $210 million on fuel costs alone.
In agriculture, the Queensland corn plantation area lost Beidou's cm position, irrigation accuracy returned to 10 meters, drought again in 2021, wheat production decreased by 8%, and farmers lost a total of $ 1.2 billion.
The problem of emergency rescue is more prominent.
During the East Coast wildfires in 2022, the rescue team took the wrong path many times because there was no high-precision data from Beidou.
When their firefighters were ordered to extinguish a point of fire, followed by the position shown by the GPS, the result was that there was no fire at all, and then when the correct point of fire was found, the fire had expanded several times, and finally took three times more time than expected to extinguish the fire.
Ironically, Australia is again relying on the U.S. GPS, but the U.S. remains the same, saying weakening signals weakens signals.
U.S. military exercises in the Pacific Ocean in 2023 suddenly weakened the GPS signal in the northern region of Australia, and five cargo ships stayed outside the port for three days because of their inappropriate position, costing more than $8 million.
Just when Australia is focusing on the positioning issue, China's global layout of Beidou is accelerating.
In 2022, China and 20 countries, including Argentina, Nigeria and Tanzania, signed agreements on the construction of Beidou ground observation stations, and established a perfect signal enhancement network in South America and Africa.
The new generation Beidou-3 satellite has achieved independent orbit determination through inter-satellite link technology, no longer relying on the support of ground stations, and its positioning accuracy has been improved to 1.5 meters, exceeding the 2.5-meter accuracy of GPS.
By the end of 2024, Beidou’s global users have surpassed 2 billion, providing commercial services in 130 countries, and even the European Space Agency has signed agreements with China to use Beidou data for supplemental positioning of the Galileo system.
Now some industry associations in Australia are beginning to regret it.
In 2024, the Australian Agricultural Association and the Mining Association jointly submitted a report to the government, suggesting to re-negotiate Beidou cooperation with China, but the government has not given a clear answer.
In fact, there is no unprovoked benefit in international relations, and there is no cooperation at all costs.
China supports the construction of Beidou observation stations and opens positioning services to win-win through technology sharing.
Australia could have taken this opportunity to take agriculture, mining and emergency rescue to a higher level, but they gave up their tangible interests because of political factors.
From the initiative to cooperation to unilateral termination, from enjoying the convenience of centimetre-grade accuracy to endure the chaos of 10 metres, Australia's experience has given a wake-up to many countries, that is to put political manipulation above the development of people's livelihoods, in the end will only be unpaid.
After all, the people want an affordable life, and enterprises want a stable development, which can not be achieved by shouting slogans.
Edited by: Alone